


Asphodel & Whisky

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: I stop somewhere waiting for you, Reunion, The Adventure of the Empty House, many (happy) returns, redux
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-11
Updated: 2012-07-11
Packaged: 2017-11-09 15:50:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/457245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not dead; not dead. It’s where they meet at last.</p>
<p>Five times, a reunion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Asphodel & Whisky

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [ScienceofObsession](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ScienceofObsession/pseuds/ScienceofObsession) for making me think “reunions,” and [ emmadelosnardos](http://archiveofourown.org/users/emmadelosnardos/pseuds/emmadelosnardos) for making me think about the power if repetition.

_"If you have poison for me, I will drink it/ I know you do not love me, for your sisters / have, as I remember, done me wrong. / You have some cause, they have not."_

_"No cause, no cause."  —King Lear and Cordelia, reunion scene, King Lear, Act 4, Scene 7_

 

Sherlock takes a sip from an Erlenmeyer one afternoon and John nearly has a myocardial infarction.

“It’s water,” Sherlock says, “H2O.  Deionised. I think.”

He’s been back three weeks.  John doesn’t live there (here) anymore.  The flat is strangely tidy. There’s a clear spot on the sofa at one end, at the other a bower constructed of a blanket.  Why is he even here? Oh, because Sherlock has texted him.

_What does one do when one has consumed possibly too much of a cardiac glycoside (inhibition of the plasma membrane_ [ _Na +/K+-ATPase_ ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaKATPase) _)_ _?—SH_

There’s no point texting back when one feels Torsades coming on. He could dismiss the whole thing, but he wouldn’t. He could call for an ambulance, but he doesn’t.  Leaves the clinic and legs it to Baker Street, takes a cab.

He’s angry now.

“I thought it would be effective,” Sherlock says, hefting the glassware. The light hits it, refracts on the table.  He looks a little peaked, but not poisoned, not nearly.

“Effective,” says John. “Nothing wrong with your sodium-potassium pump.”

“There was no other way,” Sherlock says.

“No other way for what?” John’s sternum is (likely) splitting up the center like an old white oak.

“To protect you. To get you over here. Either. Both.”

“Both,” says John.

Around the flask Sherlock’s fingers have the faintest tremor; there’s a hitch in his swallow.

“Huh,” says John. “That’s water?”

“I think,”Sherlock says, “ Deionised. Yes.”

_I can’t._

It’s (is it) like slamming the lifts on lockdown, descending (CPR the whole way) from the   helipad into the heart of the trauma.

_You can._

John takes the flask from him, from his slightly trembling fingers, takes a sip.

*******

_"They went past the streams of Ocean, past Leucas,  
past the gates of the Sun and the land of Dreams,  
and very soon came to the field of asphodel,[  
](http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/Texts/Odyssey/%28EmptyReference%21%29)where spirits live, the shades of those whose work is done._

_Here they found Achilles' shade, son of Peleus,  
and of Patroclus, too…"-- Achilles and Patroclus reunited in the Underworld, The Odyssey, Book 24_

 

It’s warm in the Underworld.  Or is it the Underground.  It’s where they meet at last. There aren’t any flowers there. (Although there was once earth.) There are posters.  There are clean tiles. There are members of the network. There’s Sherlock (who?) with the same bloody coat he had before, all those months (years) ago.

Baker Street station.  5:25 am. Sherlock (who?) walks up through the knot-and-cross of early morning riders John doesn’t recognize. There’s the slick visceral shine of the tracks. There’s the slow roll when his hippocampus comes online and he knows.

(The universe gives us so many chances to die, so few to live again. A return is a death too, isn’t it, of all the possibilities of other returns. A meeting--a question, an astonishment, an incredulity, a wink-- means you’ll leave, or be left, but not for a long time, and hardly forever.)

Down in the Underground. Meet me at B. Street,

(in the sub-surface, near that plaque, near those old plans you like so well.)

The works lock and click. The train rushes in.

*******

_"If I should meet thee  
          After long years,  
      How should I greet thee? —  
          With silence and tears." –George Gordon Byron, “When We Two Parted”_

 

Not dead. Not dead.

“I haven’t got anything to say,” says John, It’s a very beautiful day, very beautiful, post-mackerel sky. “That I haven’t already said.”

That’s a lie, and he’s talking to a grave. Sherlock is back, but he’s still talking to a grave, because he needs the practice. He doesn’t want to get out of practice.

“How am I going to talk to you?” says John to the grave, with its _lapis niger_ and its name.

“You asked me not to be dead,” Sherlock says, behind him.

“You followed me,” John says, He’s angry now, really angry; it’s spiraling up to his occiput; his skull could split and his head twist round.

“I’ve done it before.”          

“I know,” John says, “and I didn’t appreciate it then, either.”

“What are those for,” says Sherlock, “the branches?”  The light like honey lies on the graves.

“Habit,” John says.

_You were light as thrown salt, and anyway, gone._

_You were extinct, and anyway, gone_.

He bought them out of habit, at the usual stall, salt hot in his throat; all hot salt and green viburnum.

*******

_“When I turned again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a gray mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling after-taste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand_.”-- _Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Empty House_

 

Terror and wonder and horror.

It isn’t possible for a person to lose consciousness from any of these—or yes, of course it is, but he doesn’t; they don’t.  There’s no vasovagal syncope when they meet again.  Not when they meet again.

Five years later, though, John nearly blacks out thanks to a gravity blade and some razor wire. Goes down about 27% and wavers and flickers and,

“I could hold you up,” John says, from the ground. (He’s all right, just down a bit.)

Sherlock has never lost consciousness from critical patch-mass or starvation or orthostatic hypotension while heaving himself violently up from the sofa after seven prone hours, but this time, this time,

“I could hold you up,” John says, from the ground, “I could give you some whisky.”

“That’s very old-fashioned, John.”

And Sherlock goes down on his knees because the universe has got him by the collar, again. _I’ll teach you what sorrow is_ , it says, _if you don’t already know; I just might remind you._

“That’s an idle threat,” John says, (he hears it too?) “but I’ve loved you all these years.”

When they meet again though, when they meet again after that gap, the weather’s so clear. No-one loses the wire. No one loses the thread. Consciousness survives the terror and the wonder.

*******

_“I could not say that I remembered him, for now he was a fine grown young fellow, with black whiskers and a man's voice, but I was sure he knew me, and that he was Joe Green, and I was very glad. I put my nose up to him, and tried to say that we were friends. I never saw a man so pleased.”—Black Beauty and Joe Green meet again, Anna Sewall’s Black Beauty_

 

He hardly recalls what he looks like, so how’s he going to recall what Sherlock looked like. He has something of a forelock now, black as ever, or dark, not really black, never was.  No. He looks surprisingly the same.

“You made me suffer, and I’m angry about it,” John says. It’s liberating, being this straightforward about one’s feelings. Bully for therapy and maturity. 

“All right,” Sherlock says. Puts his hands over John’s lightly, just the fingertips, John Beattie at the spirit board.

“I’m very sorry.” Very soft.  (The spirit speaking, not him.)

“Sorry, what?”

“I said I’m sorry. And I’ll say it again, if you like.”

“I, uh, …no. Why’s your hair so weird?”

John’s knuckles,with the fine hairs standing up; he’s taking his hands away, pulling them up, and it is not easy, not easy, watching a man deconstruct  like that, not easy leaning over to see.

Later it’s easier, when (after a riot, after a fire, faces covered in ash, or so it seems) their arms go out and there’s that, when the autonomic goes and you let your head down against the arms or the shoulders only of the ones you love, that you trust all the way back to the beginning, when you were a child and learned to trust, if you ever did.

Later it’s easier, when John smiles, a twitch of a thing, when they’re very close, when they’re on the verge of a murder, and Sherlock thinks _oh, I have never seen you happier._

 

**Author's Note:**

> “It is a curious odor,  
> a moral odor,  
> that brings me  
> near to you…”—William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” 
> 
>  [Asphodel](http://www.theoi.com/Flora1.html)
> 
>  [Viburnum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viburnum_opulus)


End file.
